‘Slow Time Like the Present’

Romanian New Wave cinema ( rnw ) has been recognised as a medium that addressed the way people felt about their historical trauma, a vernacular insertion nuancing declarations that Nicolae Ceausescu was a ‘megalomaniacal dictator’, and a means to attract and negotiate international interest in the country’s culture. rnw was a subversive and self-conscious commentary on the experience of transition from communism to capitalism as much as aesthetic entertainment. This article argues that rnw was critical of the idea of a transformative watershed – predominant in conceptions of 1989 across the Euro-Atlantic space – and qualifications of the teleological imaginary that encompassed it. Drawing on film theory, as well as the tension between collective and individual memory, the author argues that rnw was a self-conscious and creative effort at commemorating a past, contributing to a more democratic debate about the ways in which recent history bears upon the present.